Q1 Founder Notes 3.0
Up & down $500 in a week
***Founder Notes are published quarterly for Founding Level subscribers and additionally on an as-needed basis. If you’re a Free Reader or a TTL Subscriber, look for the next regularly scheduled issue at 9:00 AM EST on Thursday, February 12***
Dear Founders,
Two people can look at the same facts and come to a different conclusion. It’s a fascinating aspect of human psychology. It’s also job security for marriage therapists.
It’s 04:00 at TTL HQ right now. One of the Tucker kids is horizontal on the Iranian Bijar. Aladin the rug dealer swore it was ~1860 vintage but had no verifiable supporting documentation.
Bijar rugs are famously durable thanks to the high-altitude wool and a unique “wet double welt” weaving technique. Either way, it’s nice to grow up on fine antique carpets.
We’ve been in here since 03:30 watching every shot of the Australian Open final. As you know, neither of the Tucker residences contains a television.
There’s a tension in the office… with support split firmly down the age line. The 38-year-old genius against the 22-year-old brute. As you surely know by now, youth won.
The TTL supercomputer has four screens. The bottom right always has spot gold (XAU) on the left, and Bitcoin (XBT) on the right. That’s even the case when the live broadcast beaming from Melbourne is on the top monitor at this unusual hour.
While the next generation stares up at the action, the bottom right screen has my attention. It’s the barbaric drop in gold last Friday. Which, as you know, was not entirely surprising.
The problem with writing a large and very public newsletter is you say the same thing again and again and wonder if anyone reads it.
Almost like writing essays in middle school when we’d scribble, “please put a check mark in the margin if you’re still reading this” and we’d see a red X there with a “C-“ on the header.
The ~$500/oz drop in gold Friday came right on time. Anyone playing around in the gold market last week got what was coming to them.
Foundational Means Cured
Gold is not a make money type of asset. It’s foundational.
That means, wise buyers add some here and there over time. You make it part of your personal bedrock. The purpose of bedrock is to keep the building upright as it rises.
People today just don’t think this way. We had an entire essay last TTL about it…and people still ignore it. They want double, triple-levered trading products. Those work great…in the middle of the action. The disclaimer people don’t read says they work in both directions.
What makes this worse is the trove of emails, messages, and social feeds out of the gold community. It feels alien to read this stuff.
Gold ran up ~25% from the end of 2025 through last Wednesday. That’s 28 calendar days and ~20 trading days. Gold trades from Sunday night through Friday late afternoon… almost round-the-clock.
The thing is, physical gold demand has little to do with the price. Meaning, if demand picks up in most everyday products, the price rises. In the case of gold, there’s an external factor dominating the price.
The price we all see is purely a function of futures trading. We’ve gone over this endlessly in past issues. We’re not rehashing it today… but you should know the active gold contract (April) traded ~57 million ounces on Thursday.
For context, 57 million ounces is about half of annual gold production across the entire world. So, ~183 days of digging, hauling, crushing, sifting dirt worldwide in search of gold… and it changes hands in one trading session. Sure.
Silver is worse. ~1.5 billion ounces traded on Friday last week… or about ~15 months of worldwide production.
Mute The Noise
I’ve had enough of the ideological segment of the gold community…
For instance, ~$5,000/oz gold has a value of ~$35 trillion. That’s using the World Gold Council estimate of worldwide above-ground gold. Let’s assume it’s the right number.
$35 trillion is a lot. Too much, honestly.
We talked about this last week, in the essay people likely read but didn’t digest. Gold doesn’t do anything. It’s money, sure. It’s wealth, sure. It’s untethered to the modern daisy chain of finance, yes. But it’s functionally useless.
That’s coming from the guy who wrote the book on gold… it’s useless.
And if you had a ~5% holding of physical gold when the book came out, that’s now ~20% or more… which is a lot.
Think about the loudest people in the gold community…which is not us. They call for $7,500 or $10,000/oz.
At $10,000/oz gold has a value higher than all listed U.S. stocks. Which is crazy.
Crazy because equity values our ingenuity, drive, passion, rights to our created property, everything that makes us what we are, according to popular beliefs. [Upgrade to Founder Level to keep reading]